Hysterical Communities: Reflections on Our Fin de Siècle

Abstract

Hysterical Communities: Reflections on Our Fin de Siècle Peter Starr A PRIL 29, 1992: 12 jurors in Simi Valley, California, vote for a near-total acquittal of the four LAPD police officers charged in the beating of motorist Rodney King. Rioting erupts in Los Angeles. April 30-May 4: Chanting “ No justice, no peace,” protesters take to the streets in New York, Washington, Atlanta and elsewhere. In Toronto, white counter-demonstrators carry a sign reading, “ L.A. burns, Toronto next?” 1 May 3: Robert Conot, former member of the Kerner commission and author of a book on the Watts riots, argues in the L.A. Times that what sets the 1992 riots apart from the events of 1965 is television’s ability to create “not only a regional but national network of ‘happenings,’ of ‘you too can be there,’ and, if so inclined, participation [sic].” “ Stimu­ lated by TV,” he concludes, “ hysteria overtakes the population. . . .” 2 May 4: In Simi Valley, Mikhail Gorbachev accepts the first annual Ronald Reagan Presidential Library award at a $500 a plate luncheon billed as a tribute to the two men “who ended the Cold War.” He endorses the American ideals of “ freedom, peace, democracy, human rights and justice.” 3 May 6: Gorbachev delivers a speech at Westminster College, site of the 1946 address in which Winston Churchill had warned of an “iron curtain” descending across the European continent. Also on May 6th: The Times reports that the County Department of Health Services has joined forces with the Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control “in an unprecedented effort to find ways to ‘vaccinate’ communities against . . . the infectious violence that overtook Los Angeles, killing 58 people and causing property damage approaching $1 billion.” 4 May 18: After noting that the former leader of the Soviet Union had been jetting around the country in a plane called the Capitalist Tool, Newsweek pronounces his speech at Westminster “rhetorically flat.” 5 This brief chronology, with the play of its multiple ironies, speaks eloquently of a shift in containment strategies proper to American sociVOL . XXXII, No. 4 83 L ’E sprit C réateur ety in our fin de siècle. What is uncovered by the eclipse of a contagion without—the plague of world Communism—is a potential for internal contagion fostered by over a decade of social neglect, a potential which it was arguably the very function of Reaganite Cold-warriorism effectively to mask. In this paper, I want to reflect on the events of the past few weeks here in Los Angeles by making them resonate with a question that has occupied me for some time—the question of what Julia Kristeva once called the “new status of the modern community.” 6 For a number of those French theorists whose seminal work in the late 1960s and early 1970s still tends to shape American conceptions of critical and theoretical practice, the question of community was intimately bound up with a cri­ tique of the one and indivisible subject—be it the individual (the liberal monad) or those transcendent subjects we call the “ State,” the “Party,” the “ Family,” or the “Nation.” Dismissing “ back to back” the liberal subject and its Stalinist, fascist or Gaullist counterparts, on the grounds that all conceptions of a unified subject entail a certain paranoid sup­ pression of alterity, theorists of the so-called post-structuralist moment reconceived the subject as fundamentally split (Barthes’s “ perverse” subject, Kristeva’s “ subject in process/on trial,” Cixous’s hysteric, etc.). In so doing, they performed the political (or better, “ethico-political” ) task of rethinking the problem of community within what Alice Jardine has rightly diagnosed as a generalized turn “ from paranoia to hysteria.” 7Whether the project behind this theoretical shift is in fact still adequate to our present social conjuncture, in which a proliferation of paranoid scenarios (racist fantasies, resurgent nationalisms, conspiracy theories on the right and left) is matched only by our ever-greater suscep­ tibility to media hysteria, is the principal question I would pose here. In the process, I want also to reflect upon an ambivalence I take to be crucial to (indeed the very strength of) the conception of “ hysterical community...